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The European Union (EU) (English pronunciation: /ˌjʊərəˈpiːən ˈjuːnjən/) is an economic and political union of 27 member states which are located primarily in Europe. The EU traces its origins from the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and the European Economic Community (EEC), formed by six countries in 1951 and 1958 respectively. In the intervening years the EU has grown in size by the accession of new member states and in power by the addition of policy areas to its remit. The Maastricht Treaty established the European Union under its current name in 1993. The latest amendment to the constitutional basis of the EU, the Treaty of Lisbon, came into force in 2009.

The EU operates through a system of supranational independent institutions and intergovernmental negotiated decisions by the member states. Important institutions of the EU include the European Commission, the Council of the European Union, the European Council, the Court of Justice of the European Union, and the...

BRUSSELS — Ireland appears to be granting Apple illegal tax rebates that may have to be recouped, the European Union's competition watchdog said Tuesday as it pressed on with an inquiry into the iPhone maker's overseas tax practices. If the EU's prel...

European citizens who want their names removed from search results now have a second search engine they can ask to "forget" them -- Bing. Microsoft is now taking "right to be forgotten" requests to remove search results from Bing. The move comes more...

Google may have a rough road ahead in Europe, where six countries opened Tuesday independent investigations of the privacy policy changes it made last year. On Tuesday, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Britain all began processes to...

The European Commission fined Microsoft $731 million for not giving all its users a way to choose a default web browser, Reuters reports. In 2009, Microsoft committed to offering Windows users in the EU a way to choose between a number of web browser...

Google earned its reputation by providing the best possible answers to consumers' questions. So it's somewhat ironic that the company is under fire in Europe for some rather halfhearted answers to European Union officials' queries over its privacy po...

Microsoft is under the lens of European Union antitrust investigators once again after failing to offer up to 28 million Windows users a "browser choice screen" (BCS) that was required for the company to avoid potentially painful fines. In Europe, us...

The European Parliament has rejected ACTA in a 478 to 39 vote, making the controversial trade agreement effectively dead and gone -- at least in its current state. The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which has been called "more dangerous than SO...

Welcome to this morning’s edition of “First To Know,” a series in which we keep you in the know on what’s happening in the digital world. Today, we’re looking at three particularly interesting stories. Elon Musk Plans Tourist Trips to Mars PayPal, Te...

Google, which is already undergoing a Federal Trade Commission antitrust investigation, is facing a new probe by U.S. and federal authorities plus the European Commission for bypassing privacy settings in Apple's Safari browser to track users, accord...

Welcome to this morning’s edition of “First To Know,” a series in which we keep you in the know on what’s happening in the digital world. Today, we’re looking at three particularly interesting stories. Google's Heads-Up Display Glasses Google plans t...

Most member states of the European Union have signed the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) at a ceremony in Tokyo, Japan on Thursday, Jan. 26. ACTA is a global treaty that tries to normalize copyright protection and IP standards. It's simila...

Android has been the top smartphone platform in the U.S. and the world for more than half a year. Now, it's experiencing similarly fast growth in Europe. According to comScore's latest report, which measures smartphone adoption rates in EU5 -- France...

More than 20 Internet companies, including Google, Facebook and eBay, will file a complaint with France's State Council against a decree that obliges them to keep their users' personal data for a year. The French Association of Internet Community Ser...

The European Union's Data Protection Working Party has given an express order to Google: Ditch Street View images taken in the UK after six months. Computerworld reports that the working party found Google's current 12-month retention time for the im...

It might seem like a minor thing, but it isn't. Microsoft has been fined billions over browser choice (or lack thereof) in Windows, and the solution that finally satisfied EU regulators was a browser choice screen, which would let users choose a web ...

At the beginning of 2009, the European regulators filed a complaint against Microsoft's browser policy, claiming that bundling Internet Explorer with Windows is unfair to developers of third-party web browsers such as Firefox and Opera. Having had pa...

We've said over and over that we're against the three-strikes law, proposed in countries such as France and the UK, under which illegal file sharers would be disconnected from the Internet after three offenses. The European Union has long held the sa...

When we first wrote about Microsoft's plan to release a browserless version of Windows 7 in Europe (due to EU's complaints that shipping the OS with Internet Explorer as a default browser is unfair), we knew that the idea was preposterous, but not wi...

Are social networks such as Facebook and MySpace doing enough to protect their users' privacy? In the European Union, they might need to do more. A panel of European regulators has laid out operating guidelines for social networks, which will ensure ...

We've mentioned on numerous occasions the fact that EU's directives pertaining the three strikes law as an anti-piracy measure (i.e., kicking file sharers off the internet after a couple of warnings) were always clearly against the introduction of su...

When we talk about an online music or video service, almost inevitably we're talking about the US version of it, because - due to copyright issues - the service (or at least some of its content, as is the case with YouTube) doesn't work in the bigger...

We've all heard of net neutrality, but what about mobile data communication? The carriers can (and often do) choose what kind of traffic or applications they don't want to see on their network. And now, the Voice on the Net (VON) coalition Europe, wh...

Despite the fact that individual countries in the European Union - France, especially - are trying to implement extreme measures against piracy, such as kicking file sharers off the Internet after three warnings, the European Union itself has spoken ...

Oh, my, not this story again. About a year ago Norwegian web browser company Opera filed a complaint to the European Union against Microsoft, stating that Microsoft's practice of bundling IE with Windows makes it hard for the competition to get throu...

...and by randomly, I mean without a legal process. You may remember that the European Parliament (most notably, French socialist Guy Bono) has asked individual countries of the European Union to “avoid adopting measures conflicting with civil libert...

It was in late 2007 that the French government first signed a pact with ISPs and content owners to combat piracy. Now the Sarkozy administration has proposed a continental expansion of such a system. The idea is based on the president’s conviction th...

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